With an impressive opening cutscene, narrated by Patrick Stewart as Xavier (even though this isn’t based on the films) and a large cast of playable characters, X-Men: Next Dimension starts off very promising. The moment you get into gameplay, though, all that hope is lost and you just have a slow, frustrating 3D fighting game.
The controls are rather strange. The control stick provides Tekken-style 8-way movement, while the D-pad lets you move forward/backwards, jump and crouch. Then the C-stick activates your character’s flying (if applicable), which means that there’s two analogue sticks and the D-pad involved in just movement alone. The rest of it is a fairly standard fighting game affair, although the special moves are unreliable at best.
There are a decent amount of modes, including a story mode that makes you play as certain characters for each fight. One strange thing is that the verses mode doesn’t let you fight a CPU opponent, so if you want a specific match up, you’re out of luck (what is it with fighting games’ aversion to letting you pick who the CPU plays as?). There’s a ton of characters to unlock, but none of them are exciting to play as.